A dentist-turned-inventor fights his battles for animal rights - and they are many - with a staunch passion.
By LEONORA LaPETER
Published July 21, 2003
FORT LAUDERDALE - Dr. Steve Rosen sauntered in late and noisy, ranting on his cell phone to a lawyer about what to do next to save the black-tailed jackrabbits at Miami International Airport.
Another lawyer sat patiently at a mahogany table waiting to talk to the skin-care entrepreneur about a legal battle involving his business equipment. And moments earlier, Rosen had hung up with yet another lawyer in Dallas who represents him on a legal issue involving a stolen skin formula.
"Dude, let's do it," Rosen yelled excitedly at the rabbit lawyer on the phone. "Let's give it a shot."
He flipped his cell phone closed, hooked it into his jeans, straightened his black Corvette T-shirt and sat down with the lawyer handling the equipment problem.
"That's the best warrior I've ever found," he said of the rabbit lawyer. "He's a gunslinger, my kind of litigator."
Rosen, 52, is the Fort Lauderdale man who has spent more than $50,000 saving some 320 black-tailed jackrabbits at Miami International Airport. He's a lifetime member of the National Rifle Association, a former dentist who accidentally discovered a solution that helps ingrown hairs, a never-married Corvette driver who occasionally flies helicopters for fun.
A disheveled man with flyaway graying hair, Rosen has become the new animal rights "It" man. He takes on his new causes with the passion of a preacher, and is prone to tirades against bureaucrats and anyone else who crosses him or the animals he's trying to save.
He's mired in enough battles to keep seven lawyers working for him and estimates he has filed some three dozen lawsuits in his life.
Some he'll talk about. Others, he won't.
There's a sick Chihuahua somewhere that's living with people who are heavy smokers. He wants to save it from secondhand smoke. That's all he'll say about that one.
There are companies out there he alleges have stolen his formula for ingrown hairs or stolen some version of his company's name, Tend Skin.
And of course, there's the rabbit battle. He hired a lawyer who fought in court to stop the government from shooting them because they attracted turkey vultures that were a hazard to the planes.
Lost that battle. But that's not the end.
His latest legal move: He wants to see the rabbit carcasses.
Let's go back a couple of decades. Rosen, a dentist, had just been fired from an HMO. "They wanted me to sell treatments that I didn't think needed to be sold," he said.
So he leased space in a 6,700-square-foot dental office in Plantation that was suffering financially, and eventually took it over after the landlord went bankrupt.
But he wanted out. He liked the work but wasn't making enough money.
"I thought I was trapped in that dental office," he said.
He needed an invention. Over time, he worked on a screwdriver that reached into corners; a spring-loaded device for posture that buzzed when the person wearing it slouched; and a nonremovable belt that would wrap around a young child's waist and allow the child to push a button if he or she got lost or kidnapped, releasing some sort of beacon.
But probably his best invention came quite by accident. He gave a black man a root canal one day in 1985 and sent him away with some Percodan and penicillin. Days later, the man returned and told him that whatever he'd given him had cleared up his skin.
Black people and others with curly hair can get razor bumps when wiry or curly hairs curve back and dig into the adjacent skin. "It's a sleeping giant that nobody will talk about," Rosen said.
It turned out to be the aspirin in the Percodan that helped the man's skin, Rosen said. So he mixed it with isopropyl alcohol to form a paste and nine years later, he sold his first bottle.
Today, he sells 500,000 bottles a year, at $20 per 4-ounce bottle.
He battled the Food and Drug Administration over the claims in his brochures, which said it helped acne, cold sores and fungal infections. Tend Skin is now classified as a cosmetic that "reduces the appearance of razor bumps, ingrown hairs and razor burns."
At trade shows, he and his workers donned bowler hats, bow ties and suspenders and pitched the product along with a bouncing ball with spikes called "Ingrown Harry."
He has his own manufacturing and distribution center with 25 employees at a little warehouse complex in Davie, just west of Fort Lauderdale.
He has expanded his product line to a nail hardener, an "air shave" gel, a deodorant and something called Vetskin that is supposed to help animals that get razor bumps after they are shaved.
In 1996, he sold the dental practice.
"My biggest fear is security," he said. "I wanted to make sure this thing was solid before I sold the dental practice."
He said he continues to maintain his dental license so he can work if he chooses. He has faced discipline from the state over the years. Among the cases in state records: He failed to complete continuing education; practiced without a license after he let it lapse; and told a patient to leave his office after they argued over whether he had told her she was going to get a root canal. (Rosen said this is the first he has heard of this last complaint).
So now he says he has made millions. He appears secure. He lives in a two-bedroom townhouse in Fort Lauderdale, no wife, no kids.
He has a cockatoo named Bella he dotes on. Often on weekends, he takes her to the pet store so she can socialize with other animals.
He's a member of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, but his acts of animal kindness have, until now, been mostly isolated, noticed only by friends or co-workers.
One night, he yelled at a clerk at a major discount chain store over 36 betta fish in cups with dirty water that barely covered their fins. When the clerk wouldn't do anything about it, he emptied the dirty water, replacing it with fresh from nearby tanks.
"He's very passionate about things," said his comptroller, Howard Bloch. "He sometimes loses himself in the moment and does not think about the bigger picture."
His mother, Rhoda Rosen, remembers he liked animals when he was younger. But she couldn't explain how it became such a passion.
More than a year ago, he said, he worked behind the scenes on Florida's pregnant pig amendment. He took it so seriously, he's a vegetarian.
One of his many lawyers, Tony Pelle, is now working two prominent animal battles for Rosen. There's the rabbit fight. And he's also looking into Rosen's legal options to help release an orca whale named Lolita from the Miami Seaquarium.
Some would say he's a little obsessed.
During the course of one day last week, he railed about inept bureaucrats and misguided government agencies involved in the rabbit problem at the airport about a dozen times.
"The Nazis herded 6-million into a gas chamber," Rosen told one of many callers about the effort to kill rabbits at the airport. "It's the same mentality. There's no difference."
"He's a fight-to-the-end type of person," Pelle said. "I think he enjoys the pursuit of his legal rights, and I don't think he likes to be taken advantage of, like anybody else. I would say that he doesn't give up easily. He's not a quitter."
Pelle pointed out that there are still more rabbits out there to be shot. The U.S. Department of Agriculture shot nearly 80 rabbits last week, taking an undisclosed number of them to a field station in Tampa for "data analysis," said Daniel Parry, a USDA spokesman. The rest were dumped at a Miami landfill.
Rosen directed Pelle to draft a letter to get access to the rabbit carcasses. Then he had his trapper hunt for them at the landfill.
"This case remains pending, and we still have a right to prove it's cruel," Pelle said. "If we can inspect the remains of the rabbit and find that they don't all have single gunshots to the head, that would support our argument."
Rosen denied he is obsessed or an extremist. He said he's just trying to save lives. He said he plans to take the whole issue to a politician with oversight over the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
When asked whether he enjoyed all of the battles he seems to be involved in, Rosen shook his head.
"Who wants to fight?" he said.
- Times researchers Kitty Bennett and Caryn Baird contributed to this report.
